The mobile game giant is attempting to trademark the words "candy" and "saga" in an effort to prevent copy-cat games from misleading consumers. Even though King admits that The Banner Saga is anything but a rip-off of their game, it may not matter. Stoic may be stuck without their own trademark thanks to King's opposition.

As preposterous as this sounds, it's a story well in keeping with our outdated intellectual property laws.

But the plot thickens, as it often does. Indie mobile developer Matthew Cox of the small studio Stolen Goose posted a lengthy story yesterday on King's apparent cloning of one of their games a few years back. Here's Cox:

"It's ironic that King.com is concerned about intellectual property when they so blatantly copied our game Scamperghost with their game "Pac-Avoid" in late 2009. In fact, using "Pac" from Namco's Pac-Man is exactly the same thing they're trying to stop people from doing with their "Candy" trademark!"

The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and Cox includes emails between Stolen Goose and King's Lars Jörnow to back their claim.

The gist of the story is simple: Stolen Goose and King were in negotiations to license their game Scamperghost but when another company offered a better deal, Stolen Goose left the table. They claim that this was prior to any contracts being signed or any final agreement made.

Then, before their game was even released, they caught wind of Pac-Avoid, a game King was trying to release before Scamperghost hit the app store. When controversy erupted over this, King contacted Stolen Goose and told them they simply needed an "avoider" game to replace the one they didn't get thanks to failed negotiations over Scamperghost.

But Stolen Goose reached out to the developer of Pac-Avoid, EpicShadow, and received this response:

First off, sorry that we (Andrew and I of EpicShadow) cloned your game for Lars of King.com. I know there's a ton of rumor as to what happened, so here's the exact details, you believing them is your decision. Lars approached us one day explaining that you (Stolen Goose) had signed a contract, had been working with him on finishing the deal, and then got a better deal and backed out. As tempting as more cash would be, if contract was signed, douche move. I don't know if that actually happened, so feel free to clear it up. He asked us to clone the game very quickly, and even wanted to beat the release of the original game.

Unless signed contracts show up to prove things one way or another, this may boil down to a he-said/she-said argument. But there's no denying that King commissioned a clone, as screenshots of the two games side-by-side certainly attest.

Even setting this story aside for a moment, it's important to point out that Candy Crush Saga itself isn't the most original title in the world. Anyone who's played Bejeweled will certainly pick up on the similarities.

Actually, you could take a look at Candyz from Moby Games---a match-3 game released fully five years prior to Candy Crush Saga that bears a distinct resemblance to that game (via RPS:)

The real threat to intellectual property in mobile gaming certainly appears to be the larger publishers. I'll invoke Zynga again to prove this point. Big publishers with lots of cash on hand have the power to buy up or copy the competition, or use the force of trademark law to pillage the English language.

So even while mobile has drastically reduced barriers to entry in the gaming market, an entirely new set of risks has arisen.

Trademarking common words like "candy" and "saga" won't prevent this sort of thing, but it could make matters much worse.

In a somewhat humorous twist, a group of indie developers has started a new project called Candy Jam, encouraging devs to develop and submit games with words like "candy" and "saga" in the title, as well as "scrolls" after a similar controversy surrounding Bethesda's attempt to protect that word in regards to its Elder Scrolls franchise.

I would encourage larger publishers to do the same. Especially those who already have games with these words in their titles.